


Hell is Murky

by Madtom_Publius



Series: Laurens Lives AU [1]
Category: 18th Century CE RPF, American Revolution RPF
Genre: Gen, Laurens Lives AU, M/M, Major Character Injury, Medical Inaccuracies, Medical Procedures, Period-Typical Homophobia, Period-Typical Racism, Survivor Guilt, enslaved character, probably
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-21
Updated: 2016-03-21
Packaged: 2018-05-28 02:16:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,791
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6311164
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Madtom_Publius/pseuds/Madtom_Publius
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is part 1 of an au in which John Laurens survives the battle of Combahee. Set about 2 days after the battle. This is the first time he has regained consciousness since the battle. The injuries and the healing process result in some uncomfortable soul-searching, particularly in regards to his treatment of Shrewsberry. Both chapters are 3rd person limited, John Laurens' perspective.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

He was dead. Of that he was certain. It was a comforting notion in a strange sort of way. If he were conscious of the fact that he was dead, then his fears had, thank God, been misplaced. The terrible nothingness that he’d sunk into in what must have been his last moments was merely a transition, not, as he had mistakenly believed, the absence of any continuation of his soul, or the absence of a soul more generally. And now that he was dead, and his soul was not, there could be nothing else to fear. One cannot, after all, be a coward in death.

He had only now to determine where he was. Not that such a final destination could be altered, but it seemed worth knowing none the less. Now that he could think (could one be said to think when one’s brain was presumably rotting in the earth?) it was strange that he was so alone. He had been expecting to see his mother, his brothers… so many friends he’d lost. Where were they? It was unbearably hot. That didn’t bode well. He was drifting slowly towards awareness and could now make out pitiable moans and terrible screams. So he was not alone after all. And the smell… it would have turned his stomach if he still had one.

So he was in Hell.

There could be no doubt about that. It explained the lack of any sort of reunion. Shouldn't there have been some sort of official condemnation, a tallying, a trial, something where his fate was announced to him? But the Almighty surely had better things to do than explain to lost souls the specifics of how they’d gone about damning themselves.

He was in pain. A great deal of pain. It spread out from just above his chest so that he could feel the wound that had ended him in lurid detail behind his eyeballs and under his toenails. It made sense that the damned should be given facsimiles of bodies. Easier to punish.

He was in Hell.

He was in Hell and there was no escape, no resistance, just the heat and the pain and this fever gnawing at his mind for eternity.

It wasn’t fair. There must have been some mistake. What had he done that could have been worth damnation?

_Jemmy_.

But that had been an accident. A just God wouldn't damn him for that.

_Martha_.

A mistake to be sure, but he’d tried to atone for it, tried to do the right thing. He had failed. He could have done better. Maybe that was it. Martha and Frances. They had been too much. He’d done the best he could, and surely a merciful God would forgive weakness.

_Alexander_.

That made doctrinal sense. But surely, surely he had not been damned for love. Not for Alexander, he couldn’t let himself believe that.

_Suicide._

No. He'd been very careful. Yes, he'd sought out a battle for the purpose of dying in it. Yes, more than once. Yes, his motives in this last action had been so deplorable. But it was not a suicide to be shot by the enemy in combat, even if he had done everything in his power to procure that end.

_Slavery_.

That felt closer to being accurate, the original sin of his country. He was complicit, had been since the day he’d been born. But he’d barely had a chance… being born into it was hardly his fault. And he’d tried to work against it. His plan had failed, but people weren’t damned for failures beyond their control.

Why was he here? It wasn’t fair. There must have been some mistake.

But God did not make mistakes. God was just. And he was damned. So why was he here?

_Shrewsberry_.

That was it. For what good were noble plans, lofty sentiments, high-minded ambitions when a person who had been utterly dependent upon him for his welfare, over whom he had had the most tyrannical power, and for whom he was totally responsible had gone daily unshod, unclothed, unfed, criminally neglected. Yes, that was it. How many times had he professed, and to how many people, with such a haughtily assumed superiority, the inherent equality of all men, regardless of color, and yet he’d treated that poor man worse than a dog. Small wonder then that no one had listened to him. Nothing to be wondered at that he was damned. Yes, that was it. God was just. He was damned for his sins of selfishness, neglect, cruelty, and hypocrisy. That was it. He deserved this.

He was horribly thirsty. Part of the torment, no doubt, to be cursed with a phantom thirst it was impossible to quench.

How long had it been? Minutes? Millenia? He had no way of knowing. Did Alexander know yet? Did his father know? He would never see them again. There would be no glorious reunion to look forward to. They would not all meet in heaven. He was damned. Would they miss him, even in that land of eternal bliss?

Everything was so foggy, fevered. Should he try and open his eyes? He didn’t want to see what sort of horrors surrounded him, not just yet, not when they’d be there forever. And he didn’t need to be brave or stoic anymore. He was damned already. What did it matter now?

There were two people talking above him. Probably demons. It occurred to him that it made no sense for men to hate demons so. They were more just, more laudable, than his own kind. They only tortured the guilty. They sounded… fuzzy. Echoey, somehow. Was something wrong with his ears? That was silly, he didn’t have ears, not anymore.

_“If they hadn’t just left him out there for dead maybe it wouldn’t have festered.”_

_“There’s no use wondering about that now.”_

_“I can cut away the worst of it, cauterize it. It might stop the infection.”_

_“He’s far too weak for that. You do that, and you’ll be killing him.”_

_“He’s dead anyway, can’t you smell that? He just hasn’t bothered to stop breathing. If we do nothing, he’ll last another two days, maybe three. He’ll be half rotten by the time his heart stops. If we do this, he’s got a chance.”_

_“A fool’s chance.”_

_“If nothing else it will hasten his end, which at this point can only be a mercy.”_

_“You call branding him to death a mercy?”_

_“Stop arguing and get him ready.”_

_“Laudanum?”_

_“No. He is too weak for that. Tie him down and get a cloth in his mouth so he doesn’t bite his tongue off. I’ll start heating the instruments.”_

Hands… were they attached to anyone? They felt human. He tried to open his eyes but he hadn’t even the energy for that. He was being strapped down. Ah. Now the torture would begin in earnest. Someone or something was opening his jaw. He was so thirsty. “Water…” He hadn’t meant to speak, wasn’t even sure he had, for how could he speak if he didn’t have a mouth?

_“Don’t see as there’s any harm in that.”_

It was warm and stale-tasting, and it made no sense if he was in Hell and demons were just and could have no pity, but blessed God, there was, somehow, inexplicably, water. It was an effort to swallow, and his whole body protested at it, but that hardly mattered. But it was merely the calm. In its wake came a thick piece of hide so that he couldn’t close his mouth properly.

_“Poor Bastard. He’s started to wake up. Are you sure…?” “_

_It’s the only chance he’s got.”_

Searing metal pulling at the pain lodged in his chest, ripping it open, making it scream, making him scream… But it was pleasure compared to what followed. The smell. He could smell the iron. Knew it must be glowing. He could feel the heat getting closer. Feel the strangely human hands holding him down, keeping him from the futile struggle he would have otherwise attempted. And he could smell his own putrid flesh burning as the white pain ripped through his mind, leaving nothingness.


	2. Chapter 2

He wasn’t dead. Whether he had been before, even for an instant, or whether his sojourn in Hell had been merely the churnings of a fevered mind, Laurens could not be certain. But he wasn’t dead now. There was no escaping that grim reality. He had been prepared for death, had welcomed it even, despite the ordeal of dying. He had nearly resigned himself to damnation and his torture.

Living was another matter. He was in pain like he’d never known, and though it was at least a week since his wound had been cauterized, he had yet to withstand it being cleaned and re-dressed without unmanful swooning. Mostly he slept. It was as close as he could come to death, and he had little desire for anything else. The fever that had been raging through him had mostly subsided, and the return of reason was almost more than he could bear. Unconsciousness was the only refuge he had, and it was fortunate that his body agreed it was his best course of action. Of course, sleep was treacherous. It gradually healed him, gradually inched him back into the land of the living, into everything he’d hoped not to face.

Yes, sleep was treacherous, for with sleep came dreams. He slept and dreamed of Alexander and woke weeping in frustration, his chest ablaze with pain. His sacrifice had been rejected. He’d done everything he could to free his lover and now he’d failed again. Now he was back where he’d been. He must either break his heart and watch, and soon, or he could continue to play the coward, ignore the grim necessity, and fall with him later, their reputations completely destroyed. He slept and dreamed of Jem, and of the soldiers he’d led so senselessly to their deaths, their stories muddled in his pain-addled slumber. He saw Jem twist mid-step and fall in the charge, heard a blue-coated soldier call softly “Jack, where’s Mama,” felt the heat of another soldier’s accusatory gaze as he looked up at him from the corpse of his fallen brother, and woke gasping for air. Their care, their lives had been entrusted to him, and his rashness, his negligence had destroyed them. And yet he lived. So much for justice. He slept and dreamed of Martha, the details of her face already blurred and indistinct in his memory, but Martha, Martha reaching for him, grasping at his clothes, begging him “stay, stay,” Martha fevered, dying, reaching, “John, help me, John, wait,” and he fled, and he woke shaking, sweating. What a damnable coward, to flee from a woman. What a damnable rake, damnable sodomite, to be relieved at the death of a wife. He slept and dreamed of Frances, coming towards him, reaching for him, like her mother, like Jem, but where her face ought to be there was nothing, and his father standing behind her, implacable, urging her forward, urging him to take the child, and he was backed up against a wall and couldn’t move, couldn’t flee as the faceless child approached him and he woke a dry husk, too parched to even call for water.

He woke and he saw Shrewsberry, barely clothed, barely fed, miserable.

There was no escape for John, not in sleep, not in waking. The mess he’d made of his life and others’ held him as tightly as Alexander ever had, and twice as relentlessly. The day he’d regained consciousness he’d asked Kosciuszko to see that Berry and the others took what they needed of clothing from his own personal supplies. Somehow that had seemed easier than telling Berry. He was too weak to face his shame so directly. Three days later Shrewsberry was still naked. He’d been afraid that John had been delirious when he’d said that, that when he awoke with a clear head he’d think they’d stolen the clothes and have them punished. John had managed until that point to delude himself into believing that he was too kind to be an object of fear, that he was different somehow from all slaveholders, that he was better. But he had never been kind, only negligent, and of course they would be afraid. He’d gotten Kosciuszko to put it in writing, to satisfy them that there was no danger of him thinking they’d stolen the clothes. His attempt to sign the paper with his left hand was pathetic. He’d managed better at six. But of course they wouldn't have cared about the neatness of his signature, even if they had been able to tell. That, at least, had worked. The next time he awoke, they'd taken what they needed.

Shrewsberry tended to him most solicitously, afraid, likely, of what would happen to him, alone in a strange family’s house near an army camp full of opportunistic white southerners, if one master died while the other (who had always been quick in retribution if he felt wronged, whether he was or not) was an ocean away. John had keenly regretted the failure of his attempt at a regiment that would have freed so many men, but his eyes only opened to the true extent of his failure watching Berry while he was confined to his sickbed. John could observe his own life, his own options, his own failings, or he could observe his companion. The latter was infinitely more appealing.

He’d never paid the other man much attention before, for all that they’d been nearly constant companions for years, for all that Shrewsberry was likely an expert on him. John watched him bear exhaustion, boredom, hunger, and all the attendant maladies of hard work in the August heat without a word, with barely a grimace, watched him bite back rage, frustration, anxiety, disappointment, and turn them all into smiling “yes sirs” as he never could have. Such a skill would have served him well in his dealings with the French. If he hadn’t been so damn arrogant he could have learned that of this man years ago. But of course John had assumed that he, educated in the finest of European academies, had nothing to learn from a slave. He watched him bear insults ranging from the (in Laurens’ mind) insufferable to the barely noticeable with a saint-like composure, despite keenly feeling every blow, watched him swallow the hurt and the fury, and he watched him, day after day, ignore the doctor’s imperious orders and add something to the inside of the clean bandages. Upon inquiry and copious reassurance to the poor man that he was not in any trouble, he learned that Shrewsberry had not insignificant herbal knowledge picked up from a mother whose location he didn’t know, and that the ointment would protect against festering better than what the doctor wanted him to do.  They were not so different it seemed. Would he too have been drawn to naturalism, John wondered, if he’d had the opportunity, if he hadn’t been forced into this lot?

Laurens had long believed, abstractly, that those they kept enslaved deserved better, deserved no less than the liberty all mankind ought to enjoy, but that was not a belief he’d ever particularized. It had always been easier, more comfortable, to think of slavery in terms of huge concepts, rather than to look into the devilish details of it so finely interwoven with his own life. Hang comfort. Nothing about his current state was comfortable, why should this be? And hang lofty ideals. All his cloud-castles had come to naught, childish toysto balm a childish conscience. His father had told him it was folly to think his dream of a black regiment could ever come to fruition, and that even if it did he was a fool to think that those men would thank him for it. In a way his father had been right: his plan had not passed, he’d helped no one, and his indifference to the care of those with whom he had been entrusted had caused only pain. But that failure seemed dull and unimportant, conceptual, when compared to the very real ways he had failed the man who was now ensuring his survival. But he need not continue to fail him. He had power here that he’d lacked when dealing with his state’s government. He’d hoped to free two thousand and nothing had come of that. But he would free Shrewsberry. He could at least do that much. And now that he had taken the time to actually know the man a little, he could not allow himself to fail him again.

**Author's Note:**

> Originally authored by madtomedgar.tumblr.com  
> http://madtomedgar.tumblr.com/post/44689607043/hell-is-murky  
> http://madtomedgar.tumblr.com/post/138968599087/lams-au-fic-follow-up-to-this-john-and


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